Sometimes I imagine Philadelphia as a sleeping giant. This is less about the Next-Great-City thing than it is about being fascinated by broke down old buildings and forgotten corners.After decades of minimal development, so much of the city is still 18th and 19th century low rise, even downtown. The skyscrapers cluster together mostly west of City Hall and its not uncommon for the first floors of older structures to be in use while the floors above them are abandoned -- both in poorer neighborhoods and in some the older, ostensibly redeveloped eastern parts of the city.
But that's changing. There are a lot of sky scrapers in the works, and even though considerable care sometimes goes in to converting older buildings in to businesses, restaurants, boutiques, condos etc., I wouldn't be surprised if many are lost to the grinding wheels of development and the city looks radically different in ten years. So I'm going to start documenting forgotten corners and abandoned buildings with my point and shoot digital camera.
Not because their destruction is imminent, but because I think they may have something to teach me/us. I am not sure that it's an all important lesson -- as much as I am fascinated by decay, I also try not fetishize it. And I'd definitely rather buildings be used and people have quality housing and places to work than the city be full of empty spooky structures. So maybe its a sad quiet but not uncommon lesson about human fickleness, change and values through architecture.
In this post: 1) the Valu Plus Store/palace at Chestnut and Juniper 2) The empty Art Deco-ish building on the first block of south 11th just past the CVS 3) cobblestones and dumpsters on Clover Street, 13th between Market and Chestnut.
1 comments:
For years the most egregious example was the marvelous Victory Building, a great Second Empire pile that was rotting away behind plywood as it's evil real estate owner let it die. I walked by it a few weeks ago and was so blown away by the resurection that I don't even care that it's ground floor tenant is a Starbucks.
The real story in all this is Center City's death as a residential area. The height of its population was the 1950s when there were four times as many people living there as today--all those upper floors were apartments and their residents supported a more diverse economy. As the apartments shut down, their ground-floor entrances were often taken out for more display space. Large parts of Center City became places you didn't want to walk around in after 6pm.
Whatever happened to the tax incentives the city was going to give building owners for creating tenant space--is it all going to the new residential high rises? Are any of these old buildings being rehabbed?
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